


Skeletons & Keys

by intrikate88



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Gen, Past Character Death, Platonic Life Partners, Post-"Boléro", questionable infosec
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 00:52:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12783360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/pseuds/intrikate88
Summary: Despite his present circumstances, Jacobi still has one precious thing with which Maxwell once entrusted him, a thing that nobody else knows about.(Set after the events of "Desperate Times/Desperate Measures" and "Boléro" and before "Dirty Work" and "The Watchtower".)





	Skeletons & Keys

Daniel Jacobi has a key in his chest.

This is not a poetic metaphor. It’s slightly closer to microchipping a pet, although when he brought that up, Maxwell had laughed and patted him on the head and called him a good puppy. The thought hadn’t left his head, though, and at the end of the day he was comforted by the fact that no matter where in the world he was, she could probably find him, independent of Goddard’s resources. 

But it was more than just a GPS beacon, and she updated it every six months, or more often if she had had a significant development in her work. 

The key unlocked a drive that Maxwell had multiple copies of, locked in secret caches around the world, and two of them had been among the belongings she brought on the Urania; they were added after the final lists of what was brought had been finished. Jacobi didn’t know where they were, but he knew how to find them, if he wanted to spend a day or three trying. Each drive contained only one file, encrypted and compressed beyond the recognition of possibly any cybersecurity expert. Even if they were found, and even if the location of either of the two subdermal keys were uncovered, it would still take a hell of a computer system to run the program locked inside.

Not that he understood all this, of course. He wasn’t bad with computers, he could do whatever he needed to with them and then a few other tricks he’d learned, but there was good, and then there was excellent, and then there was Alana Maxwell.

Then there _had been_ Alana Maxwell, and there wasn’t anymore, and when he’s alone, it’s that tiny scar at the base of his sternum that he rubs and considers cutting himself open and taking out the key. 

He hasn’t, yet, and he has strategic reasons why not. 

All of these reasons are very stupid.

They don’t go home _until the job is done_. If he gives up now, everyone else wins their stupid little coup. Showing his hand now gives Kepler an opportunity to take advantage of what he has, and for the first time he understands why Maxwell had kept this out of Kepler’s —and by extension, Goddard’s— hands. And even if he threw out all those considerations, taking action might mean killing everyone on board, and while that idea doesn’t bother him very much, they may still be necessary components of making it out of space alive. 

There is another option, and it is only strategic if his goal is to be a little less angry, a little less hurt, when in a few hundred days, he dies of starvation, or dehydration, or hypoxia, or exposure, or explosive decompression, or explosive anything else, or overheating, or being crushed the gravity of a star, or radiation poisoning, or or _or or or_.

But if his goal was to have a few hundred more days to say goodbye, though he had never taken real time before to say goodbye in his life, then the strategy would be: locate one of Alana’s drives. Remove the key on a chip in its vacuum-sealed case by cutting a small incision at the bottom of his sternum, through the skin and a little muscle, then pulling it out from where she had implanted it, without nicking anything important. Kill Kepler first, then disable Hera before she could sound the alarm, but save her deletion for later. Captain Lovelace was a challenge, but could be disposed of before the next storm; Minkowski was also a fair fight, but so long as he kept gas on hand for the vents, not a losing fight. Eiffel had an enormous amount of luck that had kept him alive thus far, and that was not to be entirely discounted, but at the very he least could be contained until luck was no longer on his side.

Then all that would be left to do was to free up the computer space necessary, plug in the drive and decryption key, and Maxwell’s AI would map the entire Hephaestus-Urania station and its functions, take control, and come to life.

Well. Not _life_. Alana Maxwell was done being alive, but a version of her, not even a copy but a creation of herself made by herself, would be there. And he never would have minded, and neither would she, if his best friend was some software and a space station. That was probably her preferred version of the afterlife, really, after the horseshit she grew up with.

Doug Eiffel didn’t appear to mind having a best friend who wasn’t a human person, after all, and humanity had been one of the more frustrating parts of life for Maxwell. 

And then, when he was done, they could break orbit and never be found again. He and Maxwell, drifting through the vastness of space, with no more orders left for them. They could build battle bots like before, see how much more interesting they could be without gravity. The space station always had challenges and surprise life-and-death situations to keep them busy; neither of them would get bored. 

They’d talked about this in Madagascar once, far from all communications, how they could just get some old boat and spend their lives island-jumping. Never stop, and never answer to anyone again. It was an idyllic dream, and afterwards, they’d shown up early to the rendezvous point to meet Kepler. Pretending they would be satisfied with that life, with taking what came to them instead of reaching to grab the world, to break it and make it tick differently, wasn’t even a daydream they could hold for an entire afternoon. 

Over seven light years away from Madagascar, in orbit around one weird little star, he wasn’t refraining from installing Maxwell 2.0 as the new autopilot mother program because it wasn’t what she would have wanted, because what she would have wanted was to not have her fucking brains blown out of her head. What she would have wanted was for the idiotic Hephaestus revolt to have not happened, so they could have made contact and she would have used her language skills and then, possibly, the job would be done and they could go home again, like always.

She would have wanted a lot of things, but people who weren’t around to say what they wanted didn’t get that option, in Jacobi’s opinion. 

But after he’d done it, after he’d narrowed his universe down to one freely floating station with two people on board, there wasn’t another star for a very long ways away. Yes: he would die, and that was fine. That was something he’d made his peace with long before Kepler ever bought him a drink. And after he did, however long that took, all that would be left was this person he’d unlocked, not Maxwell but another Alana who had also grown herself out of just the components from which she was made into something genius and special and all her own. 

She would be an Alana Maxwell, alert and alive, and alone to haunt a ship until it fell apart completely. 

Out of all the things he’d ever done, the places he’d blown up and the people whose faces he didn’t remember, he suspected that might be the one thing he’d lose sleep over. She hadn’t gotten a choice in leaving him all alone on this goddamn station, but he was sure as hell she wouldn’t have ever left him for anything less. And when he’d lost it, panicked over whether he was real or he was stuck outside in a solar storm, Maxwell had made damn sure he knew what she thought of him leaving her alone for even ten minutes.

So Jacobi leaves the incision scar intact, and the program drives hidden. If he ever makes it back to earth, he knows he’ll face the choice again, and it’ll be different when he sits on the floor of his kitchen, a bottle of something minimum 70 proof in one hand and a hefty check for her life insurance in the other. The AI was never built to be his companion after she died, especially not when she predicted he’d blow himself up long before she kicked it, but was supposed to be an expansion of Alana herself, a way to grow when her small human body was so limited by just two eyes, a few senses, and unable to see so much of the universe. She was never his, always her own creation, made from every bit of life she could construct. The memory of that person, that was all he got to live with.

That, and the key in his chest that matched the copy she had kept in hers. Maybe there was something poetic in it after all. 


End file.
